I very often see some heroes defined as “high skill” heroes and others referred to as “low skill” heroes. Inevitably, the dividing line between those two categories is always solely defined as the level of mechanical aim required to play the hero.
But this doesn’t actually make much sense. Anyone would agree that “skill” in Overwatch is not at all just about mechanical aim. Game sense and understanding is a huge part of a player’s skill at the game, and if anything is probably a bigger part of it than mechanical aim. So the idea that how “high skill” or “low skill” a hero is can be defined solely by the mechanical aim requirements of the hero makes no sense unless we assume that the game sense required to play each hero is exactly the same. But that’s a massive assumption, and is almost certainly not true. Obviously game sense is important no matter what hero you play, but some heroes need more of it than others. Some heroes simply have a much simpler gameplay loop and decision tree than others and/or are not nearly as required to anticipate the other team’s actions, track cooldowns and ultimates, etc. Those heroes require less “skill” in terms of game sense than other heroes.
Thus, any measure of how “high skill” or “low skill” a hero is should take into account not just the mechanical requirements of the hero, but also the game sense requirements of the hero. It’s the combination of the two that tells you how “high skill” or “low skill” a hero is. And the result of that sort of analysis can be very different from just defining a “high skill” or “low skill” hero based on mechanical skill.
One can probably tell how “skilled” one actually thinks a hero is—taking everything into account—by what heroes they’d most or least be okay with a much less skilled player on their team playing (or vice versa—i.e. how much you’d want a higher ranked player to be on that hero). So for instance, if you are a diamond player in a diamond lobby, would you rather have a silver Reinhardt on your team or a silver Ashe? Ashe requires more mechanical skill, but I’d wager most players would prefer having the silver Ashe rather than the silver Reinhardt. Assuming that’s the case, I think that’d imply Reinhardt is the “higher skilled” hero, even with lower mechanical demands. We could think of other examples as well. This doesn’t mean that all heroes people label “low skill” heroes aren’t actually “low skill,” but it is to say that the narrow framing of “skill” leads to a significant amount of conclusions (albeit not all) being wrong.
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That s Blizz magic for you. It s supposed to be a competition between players, you compete against each others so there should have been a similar and standard measurement of skills, depends on what flatform this game wants to be.
But since every heroes has different skillsets, everyone is just telling themselves my skills is more important than others. Truth is, Bliz just limits good player’s impact with abirtrary numbers and boost bad players with cheesey mechanic to artifically shrink down the skill gaps.
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Jesus is this the amount of internalizing all you losers that whine about widow coz you garbage at her do on the daily?
Just GIT GUD SON! Simple as that. You either suck at aiming or you are good at it. Now blizzard holds your hand with a plenty of heroes if you suck at aiming, thou like the only valid point you managed to make states; game sense can actually make a difference. Given you do not lack that as well.
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High skill, low skill. All that matters is my high rank 
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It really boggles the mind that people who think like this ended up playing Overwatch of all games. If you want a game purely about aiming there is a whole host of more suitable games to play, an entire genre even. Overwatch has always had powerful ability usage and less aim intensive heroes.
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why diamond ? why not silver ? what would you rather have on your silver game ? a silver Reinhardt or a silver Ashe ?
or even bronze ,what would you rather have on your bronze game ? a silver Reinhardt or a silver Ashe ?
Your “theory” doesnt hold up now does it ?
game sense are translatable across heroes, even though some time not 100%, sometime not immediately. If you are a good Genji player, then you would also be decent at playing against Genji. But if you are just a good Mercy player, you cant just bring your Mercy mechanical skill/muscle memory and apply it to Genji.
no its usually the complexity of the hero.
some people will put widow really high up, but the reality is shes mechanically demanding…and thats about it.
sure shes higher skill then a hero like moira or mercy but shes lower then heroes like tracer.
what makes a hero high skill is that complexity. winston is a high skill hero because despite his lack of mechanical focus, their is alot to how you have to play him. when you engage, how to engage and so on and if you mess up even a little you get punished.
heroes like moira and mercy are low skill because it takes so little to master them. moira has no complexity to her, so all you need to hit GM is to be a gm player (while heroes like tracer require you to both me a gm player, but a gm tracer player due to the complexity of tracer) mercy is the same way. her mobility is cool but easy to use and you just sit afk behind cover pocketing a sojourn or ashe, or sit behind cover mid air and pocket a pharah/echo.
thats what determines the “low” or “high” skill titles for heroes.
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I’m not sure I follow the point you’re making. My point in talking about a silver player in a diamond lobby is to illustrate a point about “skill” required for a hero. If you are going to have a lower-skilled player on your team, then that’s going to hurt the team more if they play a “high skill” hero than a “low skill” hero. So if, in a vacuum (i.e. not thinking about team comp), you’d rather that low-skilled player be playing one hero than another, then that is almost certainly because you instinctively recognize that the hero you’d rather have them on is “lower skilled.”
In theory, the same might be true for what a silver player would want teammates to play in their own silver lobbies, but I don’t think it illustrates the point as well, in part because people can’t really recognize game sense deficiencies in their own rank (if they could, then they’d be higher ranked!).
If this were so, Widow would be widely considered to be the highest skill hero by a large margin. She is not. Tracer, Genji, Sigma, Rein, D.va, Ana, and Lucio are because they necessitate both aim and superb game sense, knowledge and whatever other measurement of skill one could think of. By comparison, Widow literally has designated ‘Sit here and shoot people’ spots on most maps, but she’s still considered ‘high skill’ since she’s the most mechanically demanding hero in the game.
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I mostly agree with this. Like Winston is a good example of a hero that a lot of people would label “low skill” when he’s actually not.
Not sure I agree about Mercy though. To me, if I do the exercise of thinking about what hero I’d want a lower-ranked player on, I’m really not sure Mercy would be at the top of the list. Lower-ranked Mercy players can just be farmed by the other team. There’s actually plenty of heroes I’d rather have a lower-ranked player on than Mercy—and indeed, Moira (your other example) is one of them. Not that Mercy would be at the other end of the spectrum for me either, but I don’t see her as really being at the “low-skill” end of the spectrum. She does not have high mechanical demands of course, but I think she has significantly higher game sense and decision-making requirements than most heroes (in significant part borne out by the fact that Guardian Angel is an extremely low cooldown ability that is almost infinitely customizable in what exactly you do with it, so the difference between good and bad Mercy players in their usage of it is absolutely enormous).
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Actually the role they are on gonna be the biggest factor.
If you believe that’s the case (and I might well agree with you), then that perhaps implies that certain roles are generally “higher skill” than others.
Some roles are more impactful than others thus a players performance on those roles matters more. Tank especially is hard to compensate if they are worse players. Some of it can be overcome and compensated with smart hero picks aka counterpicking enemy tank.
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and my point is your example isnt valid, because its an arbitrary scenario that doesnt exist. and if it was true, then it would be true for all scenarios, and not just when a low tier players got lost in a high ranking game.
and no, theres no way anyone would prefer a silver ashe over a silver reinhardt in a diamond games
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IMHO, just chatting here…the skewed view is even caring what people view things as skill wise.
Hard, easy, low, high, no skill, skill, whatever.
I play what’s fun. It’s a game. It has a talking gorilla, and hamster in it. When people get all puffy about “skill” it cracks me up.
Have fun. Ignore crazy people.
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Clearly Blizz should just remove every character except for Widow
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The game is low skill. You can win games from pressing broken abilities, ultimate’s, picking meta heroes.
This game isn’t competitive. You have people crutching Sigma, Bastion in world cup, such a cringe comp. Supports still remain overpowered/ boosted. Sigma, Zarya, Orisa, Soldier are overpowered
Obviously, tanks have way more impact. The game is a tank diff most the time.
It’s less about the skill level of individual heroes or roles, and more about the impact the roles consistently generate.
In a perfect world you are going to always want your strongest teammate to be the Tank player, and the two weakest to be the Damage players.
This isn’t because the Tank role is easiest or the hardest, it’s simply because having a skill/performance gap between tanks is FAR harder to overcome then any other role.
well you wouldnt want a lower ranked player on anything because they are lower ranked. they’d play poorly on anything
the reason why heroes like mercy and moira are so “easy” is because they lack actual depth in how they play.
moira doesnt have any cool tech or unique combos. she just heals and deals dmg (and she doesnt even have to aim it)
mercy has cool movement but going into ow2 they simplified it so anyone can do it, then on top of that shes designed to pocket someone and not abuse her cool movement.
these heroes arnt op but they are easy to play but hard to get value out of due to the simplicity in their design.
if you then compare that to the actually complex heroes it becomes a night and day difference.
tracer needs good aim sure, but she needs to have great use of her cooldowns, good engagement timing, and an understanding of how her abilities interact with eachother and so on (for instance knowing that you can recall instantly after hitting melee to animation cancel can save your life because you wont wait for the dmg to register or the animation to finish).
mercy just has to sit behind cover and hold m1 and m2. she doesnt need mastery of her kit because her kit is 2 buttons + movement on a 1.5 sec CD. if your a GM player you can learn to play mercya at a gm level in less then an hour, but that same person could take dozens or even hundreds of hours to do that on tracer.
very few heroes fall into the category that mercy/moira are in, even brig takes more skill in 2023 then mercy/moira simply because she has to properly interact with the enemy team and use her abilities correctly and even then shes a VERY easy hero to play.
its even less then what widow has to do because atleast widow has to aim to click on heads.
You could make a good argument that heroes which do better in high ranks, and worse in low ranks are the high skill heroes.
That has always been how I have defined the term. “works well when used by high skill people with/against high skill people”
And low skill heroes are the reverse.
That has always been how I have defined the term. “works well when used by low skill people with/against low skill people”
People get all upset by it, but at least I have an objective measure.
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